Blogs

I had the pleasure of attending the 2016 AIGA Conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. The theme of the conference this year was “The Shape of Design” and attendees were given the opportunity to hear industry leaders such as Paula Scher, John Maeda, and Diogenes Brito talk about their personal experiences in today’s fluid, professional landscape.

The weather is turning decidedly more Fall-like here at Infragistics corporate headquarters, and that means it’s time to reflect on the 2016 Infragistics Racing season. Starting back in March (!), the team visited 4 different tracks on the East Coast (New Jersey, West Virginia and Virginia).

There is a blog that I love called McMansion Hell – you know those crazy monster houses built in bulk starting in the 1980’s? They are usually found in great clusters and sometimes on very small pieces of property relative to th…

Despite being trained as a product designer I am now working in the field of User Experience (UX) Design. While I am not the first designer to find my skillset applicable in another discipline, the concept of UX seems to deter many people like me from entering the profession. From my experience, this may be due to how frequently it is discussed in the media, its vague definition, or its seeming proximity to software development (leading many to believe they need to know CSS to enter the field).

Before beginning a user research study or usability test, one of the most important things you can do is to run a pilot test. What’s a pilot test? It’s a rehearsal of the study with someone standing in as the participant. You run the session as if it was with a real participant, but you throw away the data. The purpose is to see if there are any problems with your technique and also to get some practice with the procedures involved. Afterwards, you can make changes to your technique and discussion guide.

With the upcoming US presidential election, plagiarism has been in the news of late. Yet, when we discuss plagiarism, we typically focus on the individual(s) who committed the act. How horrible they are! How lazy! How unprofessional! All these things are true but I want to focus for a moment on the individual(s) against whom the act was committed. Us.

Empathy is said to be a core tool in user experience. You might even refer to it as Innovation’s pixie dust. That makes it seem pretty important, and it is. Because it’s so important, we need to understand what empathy is and how it works. This will provide a context for, and enrichment of, our professional work.

Why would you care about creating a “UX culture” in the workplace? And what does that even mean?
If you are a fan of definitions, here’s one for “UX culture”: The awareness of the team members/company employees of the imp…

On the 7th – 9th of June, I was lucky enough to have been invited to speak at UX Scotland in Endinburgh. UX Scotland is the annual hands-on, practical UX and design conference for the UX, Service Design and Digital Communities in Scotland and the north…

I recently experienced a major failure in an interesting attempt at self-service automation – self-serve beer taps at a Milwaukee Brewers game. If self-serve beer would work anywhere, you’d think it would work in the beer capital of America…

Space exploration is humanity’s ultimate design challenge. To start, some fundamental laws of physics must be overcome in order to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. Then, a life sustaining environment must be created in the inhospitable vacuum of space. Last month, SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket, transporting a commercial, communications satellite into low-earth orbit, and landed the rocket safely on a drone ship. This leads to an interesting comparison to the UX Design work that I do. While designing a software application may not be as daunting a task as building a rocket (or even coding a software application), there are still challenges that cause projects to fall short of perfection.

The past Saturday, 14 May 2016, Infragistics held its first XLR8 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria and judging by its success there will be many more to follow. JavaScript, Angular and Mobile dev skills were all accelerated by the leading minds in the fiel…

Last month I set out on a quest to share my observations on what makes a conference talk stick in the memories of the audience. I outlined the importance of a confident beginning and end, striving to make your points easier to comprehend and tailoring your talk to the expected audience. I also shared my personal favorite, especially when talking about design: showing actual objects. That was a good, but far from exhaustive, beginning and therefore, I want to add to that list a few more ideas.

Sometimes I’m amazed when very simple usability problems are overlooked in an otherwise good design. Google Maps is a great mapping app, with one major exception – turning off the audio directions. As you read this, you might at first think, “Big deal! That’s not that hard to figure out.” But remember that this is an app that people use while driving.

In the world of design, dribbble is the go to place for sharing your own design concepts and ideas and a treasure island for designers wanting to browse, comment or get inspired by shots (screenshots of the works of others). I believe that this vivid online community is very well known across all digital professionals, if not by the name, then most likely by the distinctive pink basketball logo.

Infragistics’ 4th annual user experience, UXify, took place this past Saturday, 9 April 2016 at our global headquarters in Cranbury, NJ. It was a fantastic event filled with presentations from thought leaders with unique perspectives on UX, design, and the process that underlies the creation of useful, beautiful experiences. If […]

A few weeks ago I was offering an “expert” opinion as a classically trained architect and a User Experience newbie. I stated that in the field of UX one is less likely to affect people’s health and well-being compared to architecture. UX tends to focus on digital rather than physical experiences and, in principle, UX allows for more research and testing before a product is actually released.

Who hasn’t been to a conference at least once in their lifetime? At the end of the day we usually reflect on the speakers and their performance. Some speakers did well, others not so and yet there are the few, who seem to have been way out of everyone’s league. Of course, we always return to this last group and discuss it the most. Inevitably someone makes the statement “They were born with the talent to speak well in front of an audience”.

Let me start with some namedropping, to prove the importance of the subject. Apple just changed the kerning of the word “click“ on the El Capitan website (and tens of articles were published instantly on the topic), because the ‘c’ and ‘l’ were almost stuck together, forming a lovely ‘d’. And no marketing or PR department wants to deal with the consequences.

Essential to the process of creating and developing engaging interfaces for our users are thoughtful animations. In conjunction with wireframe testing and validation, we also need to be considering the overall design language and aesthetics. There are …

I recently waited for a flight in Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal C. Expecting the typical travelling experience of delayed departures and time wasted waiting at the gate, I was surprised to find that the poorly rated airport had implemented a massive upgrade to their customer experience by installing iPads at every seat in the terminal.

UXify US is an annual half day conference about designing great digital experiences.

This year’s fourth annual user experience conference, UXify, brings together the community of academics, practitioners, technologists, and business leaders for a conversation about Migrating from Desktop to Web and Mobile.

This past year was one of transition for the user experience professionals at Infragistics. From product-based groups, we became a single, user experience team at the end of 2014. I think we can now agree that it was an excellent decision. Not only did Infragistics (and our clients) get a more unified vision of “design” but we all made a bunch of new friends and colleagues…and got better at our jobs.

Unlike traditional hand dryers, the Dyson Airblade forces users to awkwardly insert their hands from the top into two narrow slots. As high-speed air blows your hands from both directions, you’re supposed to raise and lower your hands in these very narrow slots. You need to be very careful and have steady hands to avoid accidentally touching the sides, which in my imagination are disgusting germ repositories.